Gustav Berthold Schröter

Gustav Berthold Schröter (* July 21, 1901 in Hamburg ; † 1992 there ) was a draftsman and paper relief artist . Starting with hyper-realistic accuracy, he achieved new means of expression in his later years through his preoccupation with East Asian painting and its Zen Buddhist-influenced art of omission. Through his experiments with the properties of white paper , he exhausted the expressiveness of the image carrier right into the third dimension. Among other things, he developed finely chased paper reliefs whose grace and aura appeal to their fragility. He consciously moved between the representational and the non-representational.

education

From 1923 to 1926 Schröter attended the State Art School in Hamburg . In 1927 he went to Berlin to study at the Academy of Fine Arts with Emil Orlik , one of the most renowned graphic and book art teachers of the time. At the suggestion of his teacher, Schröter initially worked intensively with the etching and aquatint technique. Orlik was one of the representatives of Japonism , a style that was inspired by East Asian painting and drawing. It is possible that Schröter was brought into contact with the Asian style elements through his teacher, which he later implemented in his work.

Profession and artistic development

As early as the 1920s, Schröter created painterly effects in his drawings by means of a dense, superimposed structure of lines. By scratching the paper, he gave his works additional structural elements. Schröter consciously included the neutral white of the picture carrier in the effect it had on the viewer. He was particularly concerned with the landscape as a motif. He was inspired by Asian painting with its skillfully placed empty spaces in the pictorial space.

His job as an art teacher at a grammar school in Kiel , which he initially practiced from 1930 until his conscription to the Wehrmacht in 1943 , ensured his material security .

In the 1930s he created a whole series of etchings with working people from fishing and agriculture as well as landscapes, the structure and dashed lines of which are reminiscent of Rembrandt's etchings . These works reflected on the one hand Schröter's environment on the Kiel Fjord on the other hand also the contemporary tendencies of New Objectivity and Verism . In addition, after 1933, dealing with fishermen and farmers seemed more opportune than the more intellectually demanding experimentation with the white surface.

War years

From 1943 to 1945 Schröter was a medic in the Wehrmacht . His artistic activity during this time was limited to drawings with a pencil . The portraits of prisoners and refugees from the war show people deprived of hope, physically and mentally worn out. Towards the end of the war he was taken prisoner in Czechoslovakia . In 1946 he returned to Germany.

Resumption of work and "art in secret"

From 1947 Schröter worked as an art teacher in Hamburg. Until his retirement in 1965 he worked at the Wilhelmsburg grammar school . Behind the school activity he “hid” a productive, intensive artistic work, which he intensified after releasing the burden of teaching.

After the end of the “ Third Reich ”, Schröter experimented with new ways of dealing with paper as a medium. In terms of drawings, he again dealt with Asian art, especially with the concentration on the essentials required by Zen Buddhism. From this follows an essential aspect in Schröter's work: the art of omission. It can be observed in his work as the primacy of the white surface.

At the end of the 1940s, before the Düsseldorf artist group ZERO discovered the possibilities of neutral paper as a material, Schröter began to redefine the function of the image carrier. Through radical interventions and processing, he helped the hitherto "passive" paper to gain a new meaning and made it a work of art itself.

"Play between light and shadow"

The artist scratched, punched, tore, folded, layered and cut the paper in such a way that the previously two-dimensional material entered the third dimension as a relief. This leads to new visual effects: the play between light and shadow . Meanwhile, some of his glued fold reliefs are reminiscent of human groups. He himself wrote about his work that he moved “in the border area between the representational and the non-representational”.

With the help of material printing and frottage , Schröter connected objects from nature directly to the paper. He not only pressed grass and pieces of wood, but also stones and pressed them into the sometimes dry, sometimes moistened paper. These objects each left characteristic prints and traces. Monochrome picture worlds in the most delicate shades of gray emerged from this treatment. In the creative phases that followed, Schröter also worked on the paper with pencil, India ink and watercolors.

He himself wrote about his art: It was always my concern to expand the possibilities of graphic and graphic expression. I would like to design the neutral surface - the white paper - without color, simply by deforming it, not just by applying it (of other white papers), but also by removing the surface layers.

Calligraphy finally found its way into his later work . They were words of remembrance, written in the Low German language . The drawings gave a noticeable hint of the end of existence in this world. Schröter created portraits whose seemingly extinguished faces appeared mistily as if from another world. He lived and worked for a long time in the south of the Hamburg district of Hausbruch and died in 1992 in his place of birth, Wilhelmsburg, which now belongs to Hamburg .

Schröter was characterized by contemporary art critics as "the creator of an incredibly quiet, artistic oeuvre". Today he is almost forgotten. He can be assigned to the artists of the so-called lost generation . It includes artists who were able to record their first successes in the Weimar Republic , but were hindered in their careers and development opportunities by the Nazi dictatorship and World War II. After the end of the dictatorship and the war, they were often at an age where they no longer had the strength or desire for self-marketing, which is crucial in the art business, in the form of exhibitions and external impact. Since Schröter was covered by his teaching profession, there was no material need to do so in his case. Like the Japanese Zen painter Sesshū Tōyō , whom he valued , Schröter lived in the provinces and worked independently and undisturbed by the respective fashions of the art market .

Study trips

1954 and 1955 stays in the graphic test workshops in Salzburg . In the following years he traveled to France , England , Italy , Greece , Tunisia and Norway . 1981 trip to Japan .

Exhibitions

• 1983 retrospective at the Landesmuseum Oldenburg
• 1993 " Arnold Fiedler Prize 1992". Exhibition of the Professional Association of Visual Artists Hamburg in the land register hall of the civil justice building, Hamburg
• 2005 "Exhibition premiere". The forum for bequests presents works by eleven artists. Sootbörn Artists' House, Hamburg
• 2007 Solo exhibition in the forum for artists' estates , Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, Hamburg
• 2013 "Discovered and Preserved! 10 years forum for artists' bequests with a cross-section of the collection", Hamburg State Archive

literature

• Catalog "Gustav B. Schröter. Drawings, watercolors, paper reliefs". Text v. Peter Reindl. State Museum Oldenburg, 1983.
• Catalog "Arnold Fiedler Prize 1992", exhibition of the Professional Association of Visual Artists Hamburg, Hamburg 1993.
• Schulz, Daniela, "Gustav Berthold Schröter (1901-1992)", in the exhibition catalog "Discovered and Preserved!. 10 Years Forum for Artists' Legacies with a Cross-Section of the Collection", Lüdenscheid 2013, ISBN 978-3-942831-86-4 , Pp. 102-105

estate

Since 2007, the artist's estate has been looked after by the Forum for the Estates of Artists , Hamburg eV.

Web links

• Gustav Berthold Schröter. Forum for artists' bequests 
• Catalog text "Discover and preserve!
• Literature by and about Gustav Berthold Schröter in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans F. Cords Hausbrucher stories, our place of residence once and now, Volume 2 , pages 84–85, Lühmandruck, Verlag der Harburger Werbung und Nachrichten , Hamburg, 1987